In optical systems, it is often necessary to align two or more components with high angular and positional precision. Conventional techniques based upon push and pull with screws are mechanically and environmentally unstable. These techniques also yield bulky devices. In many applications, such as fiber optic components, very stringent mechanical stability is required over long periods of time (20 years) and wide temperature (−40C to +85C), humidity (5% to 85% relative) range. In addition, for fiber optic components, the form factor must be small, typically device thickness must be less then 20 mm. These requirements demand new alignment and packaging designs that are both stable and compact.
In fiber optic component fabrication, a common task is to align input and output fiber collimators so that light from an input fiber can be coupled into an output fiber as illustrated in the system 100 shown in FIG. 1. An input fiber 102a outputs a diverging light 103. The diverging light is intercepted by a first lens 104a that performs as a collimator lens. Therefore, after passing through the first lens 104a, the light 103 is a collimated light. The collimated light 103 may interact with or pass through a filter or other optical device (not shown) to modulate or change some property of the light in some desired fashion. The collimated light 103 is then focused to a small spot 105 by a second lens 104b. The spot 105 lies essentially at the “focal point” of the second lens 104b. An output fiber 102b is, ideally, positioned with its end face precisely at the spot 105 so as to receive the light 103 and carry it out of the system 100. The second lens 104b may also be referred to as a “collimator” lens, despite the fact that if performs a focusing function, by virtue of the fact that it is generally physically identical to the collimator lens 104a. 
The most critical degrees of freedom during alignment of the system 100 are the aiming of the collimators 104a–104b, i.e., the angular alignment of the collimators about the y- and z-axes. For instance, in FIG. 1, the collimator lens 104a is shown with a slight angular misalignment caused by a slight rotation of the lens 104a about the y-axis, which is perpendicular to the plane of the drawing of FIG. 1. The misalignment of the collimator lens 104a causes slight angular offset of the collimated light 103 such that, after this light is focused by the second lens 104b, the focal spot 105 does not lie at the correct position at the end face of the output fiber 102b. Even if the output fiber 102b is translated so that the end face lies at the mis-located spot 105, a significant proportion of the light 103 is still prevented from entering the output fiber 102b, since the light does not enter the fiber parallel to its length.
Accordingly, there exists a need for an improved optical alignment device. The optical alignment device must be able to accurately control the aiming of collimators or other optical components, have mechanical stability, and be not significantly larger than the optical component. The present invention addresses such a need.